Soul For Sale

Rap music has come a long way since the end of the '80s when Chuck D called it the CNN of black youth. Nowadays rap — and the rest of hip-hop culture — is only in part a sonic news organ. International marketability has made ghetto form superficially resemble an entertainment channel, fashion television and home-shopping network. And yet its potency is hardly diminished. Hip hop still signifies, whether it comes as Li'l Kim flaunting herself on MTV, turntable scratching in TV ads or that underclass survivor Eminem "trying to develop these pictures of the devil and sell 'em" to Top-40 radio.

The versatility and resonance of hip hop has paved the way for a spate of expensive and ambitious media enterprises aimed at capturing what's amorphously called "the urban market." Close to the roots of the culture that spawned these media projects, there's heated debate over the effects of hip-hop form and substance being manipulated by an increasingly corporate ownership.

In Part I of this 2-part special report, MediaChannel gathered a panel of inside minds to examine some of the issues native to selling urban wares.

- Donnell Alexander (donnell@mediachannel.org), editor.


Roundtable

Question One: The corporate connection
Question Two: Whose urban media?
Question Three: Why play this game?

Participants

Alain Mariduena, president of Stress Media.
"... The good [thing] is that we put some fire under the other commercial venture's ass that forces them to be realer and more honest ..."

Scoop Jackson, former editor of XXL magazine and author of the NBA.com column "NBA Underground".
"... What becomes urban media by the time it gets out to the general (white) public is not the same as it was when it left the neighborhood ..."

Crispus Attucks, the self-described "urban media revolutionary." His first strike: urbanexpose.com.
"... Sometimes, it seems like urban content always has to start from scratch and battle uphill in a new medium, the Web being no exception ..."

Rahsaan Harris, Associate Director of HarlemLive.org.
"... The corporations can't own urban culture because no one can own someone's spirit and way of life ..."

Cristina Verán, New York journalist and historian, who has documented cultural movements and issues effecting the urban, Latino, and Native American communities extensively, in their local and global contexts, for print, radio, and online media outlets.
"... Urban media has too-often "sold out" the very culture by which the public has invested its trust in them ..."


Question One: The corporate connection

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

POP POLITICS

Hip hop as worldwide force: MediaChannel affiliates weigh in.

YOUR TURN

Speak your mind on urban media and build on the discussion in the Forum.